Dr. Anthony Fauci was the “picnic skunk” on Donald Trump’s White House coronavirus task force, the United States’ leading public health expert told the New York Times in a frank interview on Sunday.
More than 25 million cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the United States and about 420,000 people have died. The economy has stagnated and the launch of vaccines has not been smooth. On Sunday, senior officials in the new Biden government criticized Trump’s response.
Fauci said that some people assumed he was “complicit in the distortions that emanated from the stage” at the White House Covid briefings at the beginning of the pandemic, in which Trump spoke out. He has clashed with the president many times, but said he never considered resigning.
“I felt that if I resigned,” he said, “it would leave a void. One should not be afraid to speak the truth. [White House staff] I would try to minimize real problems and have a happy chat about how things are going. And I always said, ‘Wait a minute, wait, guys, this is serious business.’ So, there was a joke – a friendly joke, you know – that I was the picnic skunk. “
Trump criticized Fauci and flirted with dismissing him, but never acted against the widely experienced and widely loved chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has served all presidents since 1984.
Fauci, 80, had previously discussed the possibility of receiving death threats due to his differences with Trump on matters such as basic social mitigation measures and unproven treatments, including bleach, ultraviolet light and the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, all promoted by Trump as the number of deaths increased.
Fauci is married to Christine Grady, the principal bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health. She, he told the Times, “mentioned that I might consider” leaving.
“And after a conversation, she finally agreed with me. I always thought that if I left, the picnic skunk wouldn’t be there anymore. Even though I was not very effective in changing everyone’s minds, I thought it was important that they knew that this absurdity could not be said without me rejecting it.
“I thought it would be better for the country and better for the cause to stay, instead of leaving.”
Dr. Deborah Birx, an army doctor known for her AIDS work and coordinator of Trump’s task force, also spoke this weekend about why she didn’t leave a White House that contained “people who definitely believed [Covid] it was a farce ”.
Birx will soon retire. Fauci agreed to be Joe Biden’s chief scientific advisor, a role that, he said, produced a “liberating feeling”. He told the Times that he did not know how long he would serve the new president, who is only two years younger.
“You know,” he said, “my whole life has been professionally fighting pandemics … That’s what I do.
“I think what I bring to the table is something that adds a lot of value. I want to continue doing this until I see us ending this outbreak, so that people can return to normal. And even after that, there is still HIV, to which I have dedicated a large part of my professional life ”.
Finally, Fauci was asked if he thought Trump “has cost the country tens or hundreds of thousands of lives”.
“I can’t comment on that,” he said. “People always ask that and … making the direct connection in this way is very damaging. I just want to get away from it. Excuse.”